Nor is this a minor matter, for the Ivy League preselects America’s leaders. Michelle and Barack Obama are where they are because, in getting into Princeton, Columbia, and Harvard Law, and onto law review, they benefited from affirmative action, as did Sonia Sotomayor at Princeton and Yale Law School.
Barack Obama himself conceded the point in 1990, when, as president of Harvard Law Review, he wrote in defense of its affirmative action policy:
As someone who has undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs during my academic career, and as someone who may have benefited from the Law Review’s affirmative action policy when I was selected to join the Review last year, I have not personally felt stigmatized.80
These Ivy League schools “act as a natural springboard to elite careers in law, medicine, finance and technology,” wrote Unz, and “many of these commanding heights of American society seem to exhibit a similar skew in demographic composition.”81 Exactly. If a Philadelphia bricklayers union or Alabama police department set aside as many slots for their own kids as Ivy League schools do for the children of faculty and alumni and their favored minorities, they would have the Justice Department breathing down their necks. But what is forbidden in flyover country is permissible, even praiseworthy, at Harvard and Yale.
Where does this leave Middle America?
From the Naval Academy to the Ivy League, the white working and middle class is being made to pay disproportionately for America’s past sins. If the admissions policies of all the elite colleges and graduate schools are structured so that half the students are Asian, Jewish, and the progeny of previous graduates, and another fourth come in through affirmative action, while white Christians are always underrepresented, there is no doubt as to who will be running the country and who will be riding in the back of the bus.
When Unz’s analysis appeared, A. Kenneth Ciongoli, president of the National Italian American Foundation, wrote:
Euro-Catholics, the American middle class, have paid the price … of affirmative action, while the establishment perpetrators have hypocritically protected themselves.… Italian Americans, 8 percent of America’s population, are 3 percent of Ivy League student bodies and less than 1 percent of the faculties.82
Italian Americans were more underrepresented at Harvard than were Hispanics or African Americans.
Growing up Catholic, one knew the Ivy League was inhospitable terrain. Few Ivy League recruiters showed up at Catholic high schools to offer scholarships to deserving boys. In 2009 a study by Princeton University sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford confirmed that a deep bias against white conservative Christians pervades America’s elite colleges.
The Espenshade-Radford study “draws from … the National Study of College Experience … gathered from eight highly competitive private colleges and universities (entering freshman SAT scores: 1360),” writes Princeton’s Russell K. Nieli, who summarized the findings. When admissions officers at elite colleges talk of diversity, Nieli writes, what they mean is that the African American contingent on campus should be 5 to 7 percent and Hispanics about equal. And to achieve these goals, the discrimination practiced against white and Asian kids is astounding. As Nieli puts it, “To have the same chance of gaining admission as a black student with a SAT score of 1100, an Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550.”83
Was this what the civil rights movement was about, requiring boys and girls whose parents came from Taiwan, Korea, or Vietnam to get a perfect SAT score of 1600 to be given equal consideration with a Nigerian or a Haitian kid who gets 1150? What are the historic and moral arguments for discriminating against students whose parents came from Poland in favor of those whose parents came from Puerto Rico?
Another form of bigotry prevalent among our academic elite is a throwback to the WASP ascendancy. While Ivy League recruiters prefer working-class to affluent black kids with the same test scores, with white kids the opposite is true. White kids from poor families, who score as well as those from wealthy families, not only get no break, they appear to be the least desirable of all students.
While applicants are given points for their extracurricular activities, especially leadership roles and honors, if you played a leading role in Future Farmers of America, 4-H Clubs, or junior ROTC, leave it off your resume or you may be blackballed. “Excelling in these activities is ‘associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds on admissions,’” Nieli writes, adding: “Poor Whites Need Not Apply” seems to be the unwritten rule for admissions officers at America’s top colleges.84
At our most celebrated universities, diversity is a code word for their own private prejudices. For these schools have zero interest in a diversity that would embrace:
born-again Christians from the Bible belt, students from Appalachia and other rural and small-town areas, people who have served in the U.S. military, those who have grown up on farms or ranches, Mormons, Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, lower-middle-class Catholics, working class “white ethnics,” social and political conservatives, wheelchair users, married students, married students with children, or older students first starting into college after raising children.85
As Nieli writes, “Students in these categories are often very rare at the most competitive colleges, especially the Ivy League.” Furthermore, “Lower-class whites prove to be all-around losers. At elite schools, they are rarely accepted. Lower-class Asians, Hispanics and blacks are seven-to-ten times more likely to get in with the same scores.”86
That blatant bigotry against white Christians is rampant in 2010 at institutions that prattle about how progressive they are is disgusting. That Republicans who purport to speak for a Middle America whose families bear the brunt of this bigotry remain silent is shameful. In an essay, “Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege,” Senator James Webb wrote of the hardships of the Southern and Appalachian peoples whence his Scots-Irish ancestors came and called for an end to discrimination against them:
Nondiscrimination laws should be applied equally among all citizens, including those who happen to be white.… Our government should be in the business of enabling opportunities for all, not in picking winners. It can do so by ensuring that artificial distinctions such as race do not determine outcomes.87
Our most competitive public and private colleges and universities benefit from tax dollars through grants and student loans. The future flow of these funds should be made contingent on Harvard, Yale, and all the rest ending practices that went out at Little Rock Central High in 1957.
Harvard’s penitence for its past sins against minorities of color, however, is all-pervasive. Having discovered a decade ago that of the 750 oil portraits hanging in libraries, dining commons, and undergraduate residences, all but two were of white men or women, Harvard has been frantically hanging portraits of blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and other people of color all over campus to produce the effect of a rainbow coalition of academic icons.88
Yet, again, what is the social impact of ever-greater racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity on our nation? Has it made us a more united, cooperative, and caring people?
DEPLETED SOCIAL CAPITAL
“Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations,” Tocqueville marveled:
They have not only commercial and manufacturing associations … but associations of a thousand other kinds.… Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.89
What explains this American trait—to associate and cooperate for a common goal? Tocqueville thought it was because we had no aristocracy, no hereditary community of privileged and powerful men who were expected to unite people dependent upon them. An aristocracy was lacking in America, said Tocqueville, due to “equality of conditions.”
Amongst democratic nati
ons, all the citizens are independent and feeble; they can hardly do anything by themselves, and none of them can oblige his fellow-men to lend him their assistance. They all, therefore, become powerless if they do not learn to voluntarily help each other.90
This tendency to come together for common goals is an essential element of what Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, calls “social capital.” According to the Heritage Foundation’s Jason Richwine, who took Putnam’s classes at Harvard, Putnam defined social capital as “social networks and the associated norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness.”91
“Social capital turns out to be an exceptionally valuable commodity,” writes Richwine. “Building complex networks of friends and associates, trusting others to keep their word, and maintaining social norms and expectations all grease the wheels of business by enabling cooperation.”92
When social capital in a community is high, adds Richwine,
People … tend to have more friends, care more about their community, and participate in civic causes. Where social capital is greater, Putnam says, “children grow up healthier, safer and better educated; people live longer, happier lives; and democracy and the economy work better.”93
When social capital evaporates, we enter Hobbes’s world, where it is every man for himself and let the devil take the hindmost.
In Bowling Alone, Putnam perceived a lowering of the reservoir of social capital since the 1950s—a growing separation of Americans from one another, a withdrawal into the self, alienation, and rising levels of distrust. Social capital was drying up, Putnam concluded, and undertook a massive study to learn why. “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the 21st Century” is the title of Putnam’s five-year study. His conclusions make hash of the cliché “Our diversity is our strength.”
After thirty thousand interviews, Putnam concluded that ethnic and racial diversity devastates communities. In diverse communities, people not only do not trust strangers, they do not trust their own kind. They withdraw into themselves, they support community activity less, they vote less. “People living in ethnically diverse settings,” said Putnam, “appear to ‘hunker down,’ that is, to pull in like a turtle.”94
In October 2006, the Financial Times reported on Putnam’s findings of the social devastation that diversity has wrought.
A bleak picture of the corrosive effects of ethnic diversity has been revealed in research by Harvard University’s Robert Putnam, one of the world’s most influential political scientists. His research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone—from their next-door neighbour to the mayor.95
“Prof Putnam,” said the FT, “found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, ‘the most diverse human habitation in human history.’”96 In diverse cities and towns people tend to:
withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.97
“Putnam adds a crushing footnote,” writes columnist John Leo. His findings “may underestimate the real effects of diversity on social withdrawal.”98
Confirming Putnam, in 2011, Travel and Leisure revealed in its annual readers’ survey that New York had been replaced as the “rudest city” in America by what was once the sunny, laid-back capital of Southern California, Los Angeles. And though L.A. is the second largest city in America, every NFL team that ever moved there has eventually moved out for lack of public support. The L.A. Rams moved to Anaheim and then St. Louis. The L.A. Chargers moved to San Diego. The L.A. Raiders came from Oakland, and then moved back.
DIVERSITY’S DOWNSIDE
And Putnam is not alone. After Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia in 2008, the New York Times’s Eduardo Porter reviewed a series of studies by economists and academics confirming Putnam’s findings and added a conclusion of his own: “Racial and ethnic diversity undermine support for public investment in social welfare.”99
Harvard economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser traced the gap in social spending between Europe and America—Europe’s is far higher—“to the United States’ more varied racial and ethnic mix.”100 In Europe, people believe that money spent on government programs will go to people like themselves. Americans suspect it will not.
Why, then, do Americans give more than Europeans to charity? In philanthropy one can be more certain the money will go to those one wishes to help. Harvard economist Erzo F. P. Luttmer found that support for welfare increases when recipients belong to the same racial group as taxpayers.
A study of charity by Notre Dame economist Daniel Hungerman “found that all-white congregations became less charitably active as the share of black residents in the local community grows.” A study by Alesina, Reza Baqir of the IMF, and William Easterly of New York University found that municipal spending—on roads, sewage, education, and trash clearance—is smaller in racially diverse cities. A 2003 study by Julian Betts and Robert Fairlie of the University of California “found that for every four immigrants who arrived in public high schools, one native student switched to a private school.”101
The elites love diversity in the abstract. In reality, it seems no one does. Putnam’s findings are echoed by criminologists Jerome Skolnick and David Bailey: “Police-community reciprocity can be achieved only when there is a genuine bonding of interests between the police and the served citizenry.… That may turn out to be progressively difficult to accomplish in demographically complex urban areas, with their increasingly ethnic diversity.”102 Have not such episodes as the accusation of “racist cops” in the L.A. trial that acquitted O. J. Simpson, to the charges of “racial profiling” against New Jersey state troopers, to the uproar over the police shooting of Amadou Diallo in the Gotham of Rudy Giuliani, underscored this point?
“By making racially diverse societies out of previously homogeneous ones,” writes political scientist Gary Freeman, “migration has complicated political and social cleavages.”103 Freeman is saying that the country of the Eisenhower-Kennedy era has been balkanized politically and socially by a mass immigration no one ever voted for. Arthur Schlesinger underscored the point in The Disuniting of America: “The hostility of one tribe for another is among the most instinctive human reactions.… Mass migrations have produced mass antagonisms since the beginning of time.”104
Putnam’s conclusion is ominous: a diversity of races and ethnic groups in a society risks disintegration of that society. Yet America is on track to add 130 million people in four decades, mostly Third World immigrants and their children. Every U.S. city will resemble Los Angeles today. And Putnam found Los Angeles to be the textbook case of a multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual stew in which the levels of suspicion and distrust were higher than he had ever measured anywhere before. Adds Richwine:
Looking at his list of the most trusting places, Putnam found whole states such as New Hampshire and Montana, rural areas in West Virginia and East Tennessee, and cities such as Bismarck, North Dakota, and Fremont, Michigan. Among the least trusting places were the cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Houston. The most trusting places tended to be homogeneous white, while the least trusting places were highly diverse.105
Although Putnam’s finding that ethnic diversity causes community tensions and social disintegration has been known for years, U.S. leaders seem oblivious to the risks they are taking with our national unity.
“Consider how surprising this is,” Richwine writes, noting that diversity has become a declared national goal:
Achieving diversity, especially ethnic diversity, is an explicit goal of all major corporations, universities and government agencies. The U.S. Supreme Court has declared that diversity is a “compelling state interest” that overrides legal prohibitions on race-based school admissions. Top politicia
ns routinely utter the phrase “Our diversity is our strength” in speeches.106
Remarkable. Our elites, who vacation at beaches and ski resorts and send their children to schools that are predominantly white, celebrate a racial diversity that fifty years of white flight, common sense, and social science tell us may make an end of our country. Such is the power of ideology to blind men to the evidence of their own eyes. Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.
A QUESTION OF POWER
Some contend that naïveté and utopianism cannot explain the relentless drive to abolish America’s majority, that malevolence and a will to power are at work. Conservative scholar Paul Gottfried writes:
Multiculturalists speak incessantly about tolerance, but not everyone is to be assigned the same expressive and cultural rights. Those who are awarded victim status by virtue of a group affiliation have preferential rights to self-identity, whereas those identified with repression, such as Southern whites in America, are accorded no right to a sense of pride in a shared past.107
To the late columnist Sam Francis, like egalitarianism, multiculturalism was “a deliberate device by which the power-hungry can subvert a culture, whose moral codes deny them power, and build an alternative culture, whose different moral codes yield power for themselves.” Our cultural elite allies itself with those out to overthrow the old Christian order—ethnic militants, feminists, atheists—anticipating they will ride the revolution to power. They are succeeding. Our traditional Christian culture has been driven from the temple of our civilization. “By enforcing ‘diversity’ as both an ideal and an actual practice through affirmative action, forced integration, mass immigration, and multiculturalism,” wrote Francis, “the dominant culture undermines … the traditional culture and renders its continued functioning impossible.” He concludes:
Suicide of a Superpower_Will America Survive to 2025? Page 27
